The Wendell Berry Farming Program Preparing a New Generation of Farmers

Published in 1977, Wendell Berry's seminal work, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, describes the peril facing rural ​ ​ communities. Among other issues, he discusses how higher learning institutions in this country approach farming through the lens of industrial agriculture rather than teaching nature-based, neighborly farming. Forty years after the publication of Unsettling we see how this miseducation has perpetuated economic, ecological, and social crises across rural America. The ​ Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College was created to respond to these crises and offer hope for the future of farming and rural communities.

The Berry Center advocates for farmers, land conserving communities, and healthy local economies. Sterling College, a liberal arts college focusing on environmental stewardship, pioneered teaching sustainable agriculture, inspired by Wendell Berry and others. These two organizations have collaborated to establish an educational model that prepares a new generation of farmers to help reinvigorate rural communities.

In 2019, Sterling College will launch the Wendell Berry Farming Program based on the lifework and writing of Wendell Berry. The program will draw upon the College’s contributions to the agricultural movement in Vermont and, with the expertise and resources of The Berry Center, we will establish a new site for undergraduate agricultural education in Henry County, that will both prepare a new generation of farmers and will serve as an educational model for rural America.

The Wendell Berry Farming Program will inspire the most comprehensive change in agricultural education since the advent of the land grant universities and one that addresses the failure of higher education to use nature as its measure in preparing the next generation of farmers.

THE CHALLENGE

We must have more farmers who understand how to build soil and communities. The complexity of our present trouble is clear. We have lost much of the local culture that passes knowledge and land from one generation to another. Today, only sixteen percent of Americans live in rural places, leaving the future of thousands of communities in continued peril. With fewer than one percent of us farming and the average age of an American farmer nearing sixty, it is critical that society educate a generation of students to farm, to dig in, make a home, and build strong rural communities.

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.”

Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear”

Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, published in 1977, awakened a national conversation about the ​ ​ dire state of agriculture. He shed a light on the dismal state of agricultural education - or, rather, miseducation. Our land grant universities have for generations promoted miseducation in industrial agriculture that erodes the environment and local economies, just as American higher education focused on upward mobility and migration away from rural communities. Without a new concept of education that includes farming at its center, we will be unable to foster a healthy food system across our nation.

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PREPARING A NEW GENERATION OF FARMERS

The Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College will educate this new generation of farmers in agrarian thought and practices that are holistic and place-based. We will put into practice our ideal for an agricultural education that brings farmers “home” by facilitating and supporting their transition to farming using the financial assets of the Wendell Berry Farming Program endowment.

Our Partnership Sterling has been working for decades to change the American concept of education. Inspiration has come over those decades from the writing of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and the publication of the Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. The ​ ​ partnership between The Berry Center and Sterling College links two organizations that have long shared a vision of a different kind of agricultural education.

“At the core of Sterling is the concern for the relationship between man and his environment. No more critical issue faces society today, and it has become very clear that neither the narrow technician nor the uninformed idealist can reach a solution alone. Sterling provides a comprehensive bridge between thought and deed as its students confront the questions that affect the future of us all.” Sterling College publication, 1978

Together, in Henry County, Kentucky, beginning in September 2019, The Berry Center and Sterling College will launch a place-based education for fifty undergraduate students who aspire to farm and who share a deep understanding that nature must be the standard for work and production. This partnership will allow us to extend the reach of our organizational missions. Each partner brings unique strengths and attributes that form a singular, new farmer education that exists nowhere else.

The Berry Center was launched in 2011 to foster a conversation and to preserve the legacy of Wendell Berry’s work and writing. The Center advocates for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy local economies. It seeks to provide solutions to essential issues that are rarely in public discourse and certainly are not reflected in agricultural policies. The Center was seeking an educational partner to help address what it will take for farmers to be able to afford to farm well and to determine how a culture can support good farming and land use. After an exhaustive review of hundreds of programs and potential educational partners, The Berry Center chose to collaborate with Sterling.

Sterling College is an accredited liberal arts college with a long-standing place-based experiential model of education. It was one of the very first colleges in the United States to focus on sustainable agriculture and has had a campus farm since 1965. Using nature as its standard, Sterling has reached full enrollment with 130 students studying in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, but it also sees the urgent need to increase access to its unique educational mission. Recognizing that our graduates aspire to live in rural places and to be land stewards who strengthen their communities, the opportunity to partner with The Berry Center represents a chance for a small college to leverage its resources and mission to scale out, without having to scale up.

New Farmer Education Sterling College has a deep commitment to Wendell Berry’s idea that a college should make “succinct and tangible connections between education and communities and the land.” Drawing on the resources of both organizations, the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College will introduce undergraduate students to renowned agrarian thinkers and leaders, including Kentucky farmers, businesses, and organizations. The curriculum will serve students from generational farming families and those from families that have not farmed for generations. The common characteristic shared by our students will be a strong desire for an education that prepares them to come “home” to farm and build strong rural communities.

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“Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve - both the living community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit. To educate is, literally, to ‘bring up,’ to bring young people to a responsible maturity, to help them to be good caretakers of what they have been given, to help them to be charitable toward fellow creatures . . . And if this education is to be well used, it is obvious that it must be used somewhere; it must be used where one lives, where one intends to continue to live; it must be brought home.”

Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense”

The Wendell Berry Farming Program will be designed for students in their third and fourth - junior and senior - years of college. Our students will be interested in a different kind of agricultural education, one that is based in the liberal arts, is experientially oriented, and is inspired by Wendell Berry and the litany of people who have influenced him. The curriculum will be offered by Sterling faculty who make their homes in Kentucky. With its agricultural emphasis, the academic year will begin in the summer and typically take a student four semesters to complete, leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sustainable Agriculture from Sterling College.

Select Academic Courses in the Wendell Berry Farming Program:

Homecoming: Good Work is Membership Farm Business Management Readings in Agriculture I & II Comparative Agriculture Changes in Place: Agrarian & Natural History Restoration Forestry Draft Power Practicum I & II Best Management Practices for Crop Production Community Food System Development Best Management Practices for Livestock Production

Farming is hard work, and we will attract students for whom the idea of work and stewardship are compelling. Sterling College is one of only nine colleges in the United States to be recognized by the federal government as a work college and to be a member of the Work Colleges Consortium. Sterling emphasizes the value of work and responsibility as key attributes to being a good community member. All students in the Wendell Berry Farming Program will partially support the cost of their education through their own labor.

Our vision of farmer education focuses on preparing graduates who wish to serve the rural communities in which they will build their lives and are well prepared to do so. They will contribute to building a just food system by farming with nature as the measure. We know that Sterling College has had such an impact in Vermont. We believe the need is clear for something similar to happen in Henry County, Kentucky - Wendell and Tanya Berry’s home community and home of The Berry Center. This partnership will provide one more example, like Sterling College, of a reversal of the ruinous trend of miseducation in agriculture, desecration of land, and destruction of rural community.

Unfortunately, for those who aspire to farm, there are two critical barriers that often prevent them from building lives in our rural communities: student loan debt and the cost of land. We recognize both, and our commitment to the students will not end with the completion of their degrees.

Financial Access The Wendell Berry Farming Program will be a “tuition-free” education for students. To meet the present challenges we face in agriculture, we need to remove barriers—like student loan debt—and promote farming as one of the most important social

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needs. In this way, we will attract focused students who are prepared for a rigorous education and the challenges farming entails. Through Sterling’s status as a member of the Work Colleges Consortium, all Wendell Berry Farming students will work on campus to contribute to the cost of their education, including their room and board.

Working Endowment Graduates of the Wendell Berry Farming Program will complete a “whole farm plan” as part of their academic requirements. This plan, with the support of the faculty and The Berry Center, will identify a community and land on which the student will farm after graduation. The program’s endowment will be used to offer graduates low-interest loans to meet the capital barriers that so often keep this generation of aspiring farmers from being successful in building rural communities and a livelihood for their families.

“This ideal is simple that farmers should be educated, liberally and practically, as farmers; education should be given and acquired with the understanding that those so educated would return to their home communities, not merely to be farmers, corrected and improved by their learning, but also to assume the trusts and obligations of community leadership.”

Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America”

STRENGTHENING RURAL COMMUNITIES

A healthy American democracy and nation requires rural communities with vibrant local economies. Sterling College graduates live in rural communities across the nation. Eighty percent of graduates report that they are working in a field related to their studies and ninety percent report that they are meeting their vocational goals. They strengthen the fabric and economies in communities in which they live by taking into consideration the land and the people.

“We need to be talking about the family farmers who live on and care for small tracts of land out of the motivation that long association and deep knowledge can produce - people who know the difference between duty and love.”

Wendell Berry, 1973 interview in

The Berry Center and Sterling College recognize the urgent need for a new generation of farmers in this country. With so few Americans farming and with the average age of today’s farmers cresting retirement, we need to create models that do not leave the outcome to chance but facilitate the transition from graduation to getting on and staying on land. We need to close the loop for a generation that aspires to rebuild healthy rural communities and land. At Sterling College in Vermont, we’ve demonstrated that this model works.

The Wendell Berry Farming Program will be distinct in its connection to the writing and thinking of Wendell Berry, and in his home community that has inspired us through his works, we will create a new “homecoming.” To do so, we will build on what we have learned in Vermont to create a place-based model in Kentucky that uses the assets of the Wendell Berry Farming Program endowment to finance the transition from graduation to establishing a farm.

The Multiplier Effect In Vermont, we’ve learned that a college with a curriculum focused on the working rural landscape will contribute to the wellbeing of that community. Unlike so many colleges, our campus is the human and extended natural community of which we are a part. We also know one another and meet as a community of faculty and students to establish the patterns and standards of living together. Our students volunteer at the fire department, fiddle, attend church, walk the woods, paddle, hunt

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and fish, work extra hours at the General Stores and for local farmers. Sterling teaches place, not the theory, but the practice of place-based rural living. The white clapboard houses, pastures, and woods that make up our “campus” blend into those of our neighbors. So too will be the case for the students of the Wendell Berry Farming Program in New Castle, Kentucky.

Sterling graduates live in rural communities across the nation, with most living nearby in Vermont and New England. Eighty-percent of Sterling graduates report to us that they are working in a field related to their studies and ninety-percent report that they are meeting their vocational goals. They strengthen the fabric and economies in communities in which they live by finding gainful employment focused on improving the relationship of the places they live by taking into consideration the land and the people. Sterling alumni start businesses, farm, conserve land, teach, volunteer, organize around issues, conduct research, write policy, and bring vitality and health to the communities in which they live, work, and raise families.

With a graduating class of 25 well-educated community-minded farmers each year in New Castle, Kentucky, the Wendell Berry Farming Program will contribute to the vitality of the region and generate local agricultural resilience. It is our view that, building on what we’ve learned in Vermont, that the same principles and vision can be extended to other communities with a similar effect.

REQUEST FOR CONSIDERATION

The Berry Center and Sterling College are undertaking an ambitious collaborative effort to raise the funds necessary to launch and sustain the Wendell Berry Farming Program. We need these resources to revive farm economies, good land use, and vitality for rural America. We believe that a new agrarian educational model, one that is both practical and visionary, is essential at this critical time.

“ [I]f improvement is going to begin anywhere, it will have to begin out in the country and in the country towns. This is not because of any intrinsic virtue that can be ascribed to rural people, but because of their circumstances. Rural people are living, and have lived for a long time, at the site of the trouble.”

Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture”

Fiscal Years 2018 - 2020 The Berry Center and Sterling College, as partnering organizations, will ensure that existing operations and programs are not compromised as a result of the launch of the Wendell Berry Farming Program. The start-up costs include pilot educational programs for students, academic and administrative leadership in outreach and curricular design, travel, and promotion of the program to raise the funds to secure the program in perpetuity.

Critical early funding has already been provided by The Endeavor Foundation, The Lydia B. Stokes Foundation, and The Norton Foundation.

Farm and Housing Purchase Like the College’s campus in Vermont, the Wendell Berry Farming Program will be integrated into its hometown. Property prices in Kentucky are favorable for our endeavor. Identifying and purchasing the land on which to teach agriculture is among the most important steps we will take in fostering our students’ understanding of life in a rural community and in strengthening their ties to Henry County.

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The Wendell Berry Farming Program will require residential housing in town for fifty students, two classrooms, and agricultural land and a woodlot on which to teach and raise food. These assets will belong to The Berry Center.

Working Endowment The urgency of the challenges facing rural America and the crisis in farming requires that we prepare students to farm and to establish them in rural communities and on land. To do so, we first have to break the crippling effect of student loan debt on aspiring farmers.

Tuition Free: The endowment, held by Sterling College, will be restricted to sustain a tuition-free and student debt-free program ​ of study for fifty students in perpetuity. Students would remain responsible to pay for room and board through work program wages and family support. The endowment goal represents approximately $600,000 per student. Based on the College’s investment policies, the annual endowment income draw would provide approximately $30,000 per student.

Access to Capital: Our endowment assets will also be used to close the loop, to facilitate moving graduates who have successfully ​ completed a “whole farm” planning curriculum to have access to low interest loans in collaboration with partner financial institutions to begin farming and building strong rural communities.

WENDELL BERRY

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky writer and farmer who has authored more than fifty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934, where he lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal. He has devoted his life to small farmers and land-conserving communities, and 2017 marks the fortieth anniversary of The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, a landmark book that sparked a decades-long conversation about ​ ​ the state of industrial agriculture. Among numerous awards and honors earned over sixty years, including Guggenheim and ​ ​ Fellowships (1962, 1965), he most recently was granted the National Humanities Medal (2010), gave the 2012 , and gained membership in the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame (2015).

LEADERSHIP

Matthew Derr, President, Sterling College

A community organizer and educator, Matthew has led Sterling College through an unparalleled period of growth in enrollment, philanthropic support, and renewed focus on its mission of environmental stewardship. He was recognized by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education as chief executive officer of the year in 2010. He is an advocate for placed-based models of liberal arts education and has led the efforts to establish both the School for the New American Farmstead and the Wendell Berry Farming Program. President Derr serves as the Chair of the Work Colleges Consortium and the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges.

Mary Berry, Executive Director, The Berry Center

Mary Berry was raised by her parents, Wendell and Tanya Berry, at Lanes Landing Farm in Henry County, Kentucky, from the time she was six years old. She farmed for a living in Henry County, starting out in dairy farming, growing Burley tobacco, and later diversifying to organic vegetables, pastured poultry, and grass-fed beef. A trustee of Sterling College and the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, she speaks all over the country as a proponent of agriculture of the middle, in defense of small farmers, and in the hope of restoring a culture and an economy that has been lost in rural America.

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Leah Bayens, Dean, the Wendell Berry Farming Program

Leah joined The Berry Center’s work in 2012 as the director of the former Berry Farming Program at St. Catharine College, where she developed undergraduate degrees that translated Wendell Berry’s work into a hands-on, interdisciplinary curriculum. In partnership with Sterling College, Leah fine-tunes this new agrarian education, calling on her research in agrarian literature, history, and culture. Leah earned her Ph.D.at the in environmental literature.

STERLING COLLEGE

Founded in 1958 in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, Sterling College is the leading voice in higher education for environmental stewardship and rural place-based education. The College was among the first colleges in the United States to focus on through academic majors in Ecology, Environmental Humanities, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, and Outdoor Education. Enrolling 130 undergraduate and 140 continuing education students, Sterling is home to the School of the New American Farmstead and the Wendell Berry Farming Program, is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, and is one of nine federally recognized Work Colleges in the nation.

THE BERRY CENTER

The Berry Center is putting Wendell Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies. Their work seeks to provide solutions to essential issues that are rarely in public discourse and certainly are not reflected in agricultural policies. “What will it take for farmers to be able to afford to farm well?” and “How do we become a culture that supports good farming and land use?” They believe that the answers—while firmly rooted in local work—are central to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems including the devastation of natural resources and biodiversity; rapid onset of ; economic and social inequities; and the collapse of healthy farming and rural communities.

CURRICULUM & BUSINESS PLAN

A detailed description of the curriculum, faculty biographies, organization, legal agreement, and business plan for the Wendell Berry Farming Program has been prepared and is available to interested parties.

CONTACT INFORMATION

The Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College 16 Sterling Drive Craftsbury Common, Vermont 05827 www.sterlingcollege.edu/wendellberry

Matthew Derr, President, Sterling College [email protected] (802) 586-7711

Mary Berry, Executive Director, The Berry Center [email protected] (502) 845-9200

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